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Lone voice of freedom defies
Mugabe
By Caroline
Davies
(Filed: 12/01/2002)
IN a tiny studio tucked away in an anonymous London
office block, the staff of SW Radio Africa are rushing around,
answering phones and putting the finishing touches to the running
order.
"It's not my best," groans Violet Gonda of her
interview with the Zimbabwean justice minister, Patrick Chinamasa.
"He was so aggressive and I fell apart." But there is no time to
edit.
The tape will run as it is and, in half-an-hour,
listeners all over Zimbabwe will tune to 6145KHz on the 49-metre
waveband to hear their country's only independent radio station
broadcast its daily three-hour news programme.
That this dedicated group of eight journalists and
technicians have been forced to leave Zimbabwe for London to
broadcast independent Zimbabwean news is due to President Mugabe's
draconian broadcasting regulations.
If, as is anticipated, he pushes through the Access
to Information and Protection of Privacy Bill on Monday, further
strangling press freedom with even stricter measures against
newspaper journalists, SW Radio Africa could be the only outlet for
genuinely independent news in the country.
SW Radio Africa is the brainchild of Gerry Jackson,
49, a journalist with the state-controlled Zimbabwe Broadcasting
Corporation for 13 years until she was sacked for "insubordination"
for taking live calls on air from listeners during the 1997 food
riots.
She fought and won a legal battle in the Supreme
Court in 2000 to set up an independent radio station, Capital FM, in
Harare. Six days after it went on air it was closed down by some men
with AK47s when Mugabe used his presidential powers to overturn the
court's decision.
After "sitting around for a while", she decided to
broadcast from outside Zimbabwe. It took her a year to raise funds.
She moved to London two months ago and SW Radio Africa went on air
on Dec 19.
Ms Gonda, who left Zimbabwe 18 months ago to study
journalism at London's City University, was also recruited. Others
involved do not wish to be identified, for fear of reprisals against
their families at home.
"We can get to the remote rural places that the
independent newspapers cannot," Ms Jackson says. "As long as people
can afford the batteries for their radios, they can tune in." |
